La Fenice, Venice, Italy

Third Place in a Competition to reinvent / reinterpret the famous Fenice Theater in Venice, Italy that had been destroyed in a fire.

In opposition to constructing a “new” opera theater or to reconstructing the Fenice exactly as it was, this proposition utilizes the program(s) of theater’s tectonic elements and disperses them through the city in order to challenge the idea of the city itself. Once in the city, they are reprogrammed in an attempt to bring back the true spirit of the traditional Venetian spectacle.

The traditional games performed by the Venetian populace during Candelmas have therefore been recaptured, redefined, and reinserted into the living history of Venezia.

>>A Chair for Killing the Cat
(This entailed beating a plump white cat to death with one’s head while the cat was free to use its claws to defend itself. The cat-killer’s scull had to be shaven, whence the Venetian expression, “to kill a cat with your shaven head.”)

>>A Stair for Grabbing the Goose
(Competitors leap from a stair or bridge after a live goose, which is dangled from a balcony by a rope; the winner who manages to grab the wretched creature carries it in triumph through the streets.)

>>A Wall for Baiting the Bull
(the bull was tethered by a rope lashed to its horns, while dogs worried at its most vulnerable parts.)

These performative operations compromise the totality of unrepeatable human interactions within the built environment. It is not the architecture that opens the possibility of spectacle, rather it is the spectacle which provides the possibility for architecture. Thus, for the Venetians, the traditional opera theater can be reimagined through a fragmentation of the architectural elements. By dispersion in the city, they can begin to acquire a new meaning, a new tradition, and new modern mythologies.